Abstract During World War I the combatants committed the total resources of their nations in this first great total war. This came to include geological expertise. The original use of geologists on the battlefield was to locate potable water supplies; later employments were an outgrowth of the stalemate on the battlefield. Mine warfare quickly developed as the belligerents tried to tunnel under the formidable trench systems. Geologists in uniform provided assistance for these efforts and came to be valued for their professional advice. More uses were quickly found for geologists. Trafficability studies of terrain, predictions of stream and river heights, sources of construction materials, and location of water supplies were important missions. Later, as both sides learned to communicate through ground-loop telephony, ground-conductivity studies became important. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, mine warfare had been neutralized by countermining, and no further active mine operations were undertaken. The U.S. Army sent 10 geologists (three more were en route on November 11, 1918), a mining regiment, and a water supply regiment of engineers to support the American Expeditionary Force. Most geologic work was in terrain studies and in mapping, water supply, and soil trafficability studies. In the United States, other geologists worked to discover sources of scarce raw materials. American geologists generally were disappointed, however, at the contributions they were able to make to the war effort, whether in France or America.

Abstract At its peak, the Eastern Front encompassed the entire frontier between the Russian Empire and Romania on the Allied side and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire and the German Empire on the other: a distance of c . 1500–1700 km. Mobile warfare alternated with periods of static trench and siege warfare, when ‘mines’ (tunnels charged with explosives detonated to breach the overhead fortifications) and ‘dugouts’ (to protect troops from artillery or aerial bombardment) were constructed in at least 50 localities between 1915 and 1917, from Mitau in present-day Latvia to Rarancze in Moldova. Terrain ranged from plateaux floored by Cenozoic sediments in the north to mountains with more complex, older, stronger rocks in the south. Despite lessons learnt from the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, both sides began the conflict unprepared for tunnelling warfare. However, German and Austro-Hungarian forces soon developed units of military geologists whose duties included guidance of tunnelling projects. Eight teams of German military geologists and four of Austro-Hungarian, in total over 60 men who can be named, are known to have served on the Front, as did newly formed and equipped specialist engineer mining battalions from Prussia, Bavaria and Austria-Hungary.

Abstract Quarrying Companies were a new type of unit first raised within the Royal Engineers in World War I. Thirteen served in northern France, on the Western Front: two from late 1916 (198 and 199 Quarrying Companies) and 11 more from 1917 (320–329 and 348 Quarrying Companies). Recruited from Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Island of Guernsey, each consisted of four officers and 264 soldiers; over 3000 men in total, assisted by c . 4000 less skilled labourers. They were used to support the British Expeditionary Force by providing ‘stone’, mostly from existing quarries near Marquise, NE of the port of Boulogne. There they excavated Devonian and Carboniferous ‘limestones’ in the Ferques Inlier, relatively strong rocks within a region of wide Mesozoic and Cenozoic outcrop. As the British Expeditionary Force expanded to a peak of five armies and c . 1.5 million troops, ‘stone’ was required for the enhancement or repair of the roads, railways and associated facilities that formed a crucial element of its infrastructure, essential for the efficient movement of soldiers and their copious supplies of food, stores and ammunition. The requirement ceased soon after the end of hostilities and all Quarrying Companies Royal Engineers were disbanded in 1919.

Abstract The first British Army hydrogeologist to be deployed as such on a battlefield was Lieutenant W.B.R. King, in June 1915 on the Western Front. There, the British Expeditionary Force, in Belgium and northern France, expanded at its peak to five armies: 1.5 million men and 0.5 million horses/mules, each man/animal requiring on average 10 gallons (45 l) per day of potable water. A ‘Water Boring Section Royal Engineers’ was eventually raised for each army, equipped with American-made ‘portable’ drilling rigs, and utilizing air-lift pumps. These innovations and King's pioneering ‘water supply’ maps facilitated the development of the British Army's first operational ability to exploit groundwater from deep aquifers, primarily those in Cretaceous Chalk, by drilling >470 boreholes. Additionally, in 1915, a report by three ‘British’ Geological Survey officers helped guide limited boring within Allied amphibious landing areas on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey. A civilian water adviser, Arthur Beeby Thompson, transferred from Gallipoli to the Balkans in January 1916 and thereafter used geology to guide significant groundwater abstraction by siting 125 military boreholes and 211 Norton tube wells. From 1915, the Director of the Geological Survey of Egypt, W.F. Hume, provided similar guidance for campaigns from Egypt into Palestine.

Abstract The German Army developed a military geological organization during World War I largely as a response to near-static battlefield conditions on the Western Front, in Belgium and northern France. In 1916 it was assigned to support military survey, but in late 1918 it was reassigned to the engineer branch of the Army. It contained over 350 geologists and associated technicians by the end of the war. Military geologists contributed advice on engineering geology and hydrogeology (principally on water supply, but also site drainage). They compiled a large number and wide range of groundwater prospect maps to guide military planning, at scales typically from 1:250 000 to 1:25 000. They contributed advice to guide effective use of groundwater by means of dug or bored wells, ‘Abyssinian’ driven tube wells, and protected capturing of springs. Field hygiene was of particular concern, and military geologists helped to avoid contamination of groundwater, for example by appropriate siting of cess-pits and cemeteries. A few officers made use of dowsing in attempts to locate groundwater, including at least one German in support of Ottoman Turk campaigns SW from Palestine towards the British-held Suez Canal, their Austro-Hungarian allies in campaigns south against Italy and in the Balkans, but with relatively insignificant success.

Abstract Scientists have long been trained to build on the successes or failures of their predecessors, their teachers, and their fellows largely through scientific associations and their publications. Such societies range from small, local ones to huge organizations with membership drawn from over 100 countries. The oldest and most prestigious for geophysicists is the Royal Society, given both its name and charter by Britain’s King Charles II back in 1660. The Royal Astronomical Society, chartered in 1820, has also had a marked interest in geophysical matters, even to the extent of publishing a Geophysical Journal , because the earth is very much a part of the planetary system. Within the United States, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was started as an ally of government at the initiative of President Abraham Lincoln who asked the scientific community in 1863 for technical assistance with the war effort. Geophysical societies per se did not appear until the early 1900s. As a result of the great San Francisco earthquake, the Seismological Society of America (SSA) was formed in 1906. The International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) came into being in 1911, while its U.S. interface, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), was finally organized in 1919. The field of exploration geophysics lagged even further, with the Society of Exploration Geophysicists not being incorporated until 1930.

Abstract In the decade between 1910 and 1920, Penrose set definitely the pattern of life which he followed for the remainder of his days. His mining interests and his investments, his duties as member of many boards of direction and of scientific and professional societies, occupied most of his time. Although he kept the house at 1331 Spruce Street open and fully staffed, he maintained a suite at the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, where he lived and where he died, and also kept permanent quarters at various places in New York—Hotel Wolcott, the University Club, the Harvard Club—so that he might occupy his own room whenever he went to the metropolis, which was frequently. In all organizations and clubs where it was possible to do so, he became a life member. He attended the meetings of organizations to which he belonged, the list including various International Geological Congresses—Toronto in 1913, Brussels in 1922, Madrid in 1926. In 1911 he went to Europe in the winter and spent the summer in western United States. That he also intended to go into the Hudson Bay country of Canada is evident from the following correspondence with Herbert Hoover:Letter from Penrose to H. C. Hoover, dated Savoy Hotel, London, May 11, igu Dear HooverMany thanks for your telegram telling me that you have managed to get the Hudson Bay Co. to give me a letter to their posts.

This book complements the Geological Society’s Special Publication 362: Military Aspects of Hydrogeology . Generated under the auspices of the Society’s History of Geology and Engineering Groups, it contains papers from authors in the UK, USA, Germany and Austria. Substantial papers describe some innovative engineering activities, influenced by geology, undertaken by the armed forces of the opposing nations in World War I. These activities were reactivated and developed in World War II. Examples include trenching from World War I, tunnelling and quarrying from both wars, and the use of geologists to aid German coastal fortification and Allied aerial photographic interpretation in World War II. The extensive introduction and other chapters reveal that ‘military geology’ has a longer history. These chapters relate to pre-twentieth century coastal fortification in the UK and the USA; conflict in the American Civil War; long-term ‘going’ assessments for German forces; tunnel repair after wartime route denial in Hong Kong; and tunnel detection after recent insurgent improvisation in Iraq.

Abstract Napoleon Bonaparte was, in 1798, the first general to include geologists as such on a military operation. Within the UK, the following century saw geology taught, and national geological mapping initiated, as a military science. Nevertheless, military geologists were not deployed on a battlefield until World War I, first by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies and later and less intensively those of the UK and USA. Geologists were used primarily to guide abstraction of groundwater, construction of ‘mine’ tunnels and dug-outs, development of fortifications and quarrying of natural resources to enhance or repair supply routes. Only the USSR and Germany entered World War II with organized military geological expertise, but the UK and later the USA made significant use of military geologists, albeit far fewer than the c . 400 in total used by German forces. Military geologist roles in World War II included most of those of World War I, but were extended to other aspects of terrain evaluation, notably the rapid construction of temporary airfields and factors affecting cross-country vehicular movement (‘going’). After 1945, more military geologists were used in the USA than Germany or the UK, in these and wider roles, but mostly as civilians or reservists.

Abstract The first recorded use of terrain analysis was in 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars, and in most major military operations since that time, geologic counsel and assessment have played important roles. Intelligent use of the terrain of the battlefield, movement of supplies and personnel, and the procurement of adequate supplies of water and of construction materials all have relied on an understanding and application of geologic principles. During the 19th century, as the value of geologic insight came to be recognized, books on military geology appeared as did basic courses in geology at military academies in the United States and abroad. Beginning in World War I, vital geologic data were placed on increasingly sophisticated specialized terrain maps and used both tactically and strategically. Successful military mining beneath enemy fortifications in World War I required an understanding of subsurface geology, including hydrogeology. And in the 1940s and 1950s, geologic principles were applied on an unprecedented scale to the construction of massive underground installations. Moreover, in the 1950s, these principles, applied in a massive research effort, resulted in the ability to distinguish the release of energy by an underground nuclear test from that produced by a natural seismic event. As weapons and defenses against them continue to evolve, geoscience and geoscientists will play an increasingly important role in military planning and operations in diverse and challenging environments worldwide.

Abstract The history of the European oil and gas industry reflects local and global political events, economic constraints, and the personal endeavours of individual petroleum geoscientists, as much as it does the development of technologies and the underlying geology of the region. Europe and Europeans played a disproportionately large role in the development of the modern global oil and gas industry. From at least the Iron Age until the 1850s, the use of oil in Europe was limited, and the oil was obtained almost exclusively from surface seeps and mine workings. The use of oil increased in the 1860s with the introduction of new technologies in both production and refining. Shale oil was distilled on a commercial scale in various parts of Europe in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century but, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the mineral oils and gas produced primarily from shale and coal could no longer satisfy demand, and oil produced directly from conventional oil fields began to dominate the European market. The first commercial oil wells in Europe were manually dug in Poland in 1853, Romania in 1857, Germany in 1859 and Italy in 1860, before the gradual introduction of mechanical cable drilling rigs started in the early 1860s. In the late nineteenth century, the northern part of the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Poland and Ukraine was one of the most prolific hydrocarbon provinces in the world. The Bóbrka Field in the Carpathian foothills of Poland, discovered in 1853, is still producing and is now the oldest industrial oil field in the world. The 1914–18 and 1939–45 world wars were both major drivers in exploration for and exploitation of Europe’s oil resources and in the development of technologies to produce synthetic fuels from the liquefaction of bituminous coal and the combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen as the Allied and Axis governments struggled to maintain adequate supplies of fuel for their war efforts. In Britain, the first ‘accidental’ discovery of gas was made in 1875 in the Weald Basin, but it was not until 1919 that Britain’s first oil field was discovered at Hardstoft, in Derbyshire, as a result of a government-funded exploration drilling campaign, triggered by the need to find indigenous supplies of oil during World War I. The period of reconstruction after World War II was also critical for the European oil and gas industry with further successful exploration for oil and gas in the East Midlands of England resulting in Britain’s first ‘oil boom’, and the discovery and development of deep gas fields in the Po Valley in northern Italy fuelling the Italian economy for the next 50 years. Drilling technologies developed during Britain’s first oil boom, together with the extrapolation of the onshore geology of the East Midlands oil fields and of the Dutch gas fields, led to the discovery of the huge oil and gas resources beneath the North Sea in the 1960s and 1970s, which enabled Britain, Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands to be largely self-sufficient in oil and gas from the late 1970s until production began to decline rapidly in the early 2000s. Today, oil and gas production in most European countries is at an historical low. Exploration for new sources of oil and gas in Europe continues, although increasingly hampered by the maturity of many of the conventional oil and gas plays, but European companies and European citizens continue to play a major role in the global oil and gas industry.